iOS 15 Home app and HomeKit have excessive battery drain

@Hfjustin great idea! If you set up a Home Assistant server and then present it to HomeKit, don't you still need to have an Apple TV (or HomePod or iPad) acting as a home hub in order for you to control your HomeKit devices while you're away using the native Home app?

It seems to me what we all have in common is an Apple TV or HomePod at home, which act as a home hub by default. So I'm wondering if your setup still allows remote control without an Apple TV or HomePod at home.

So I never had the problem but last night I left my iPad with 35-40% battery left and this evening when I tried to use it the iPad is dead.

The Home:Accesories drained all the battery in 13 hours.

I usually don’t charge the iPad every day but often every 3 days, I have it for little over a year and this is the first time this happened.

I have a Hue Bridge and lights for years, an Apple TV 4K since its release and nothing changed recently in this setup.

The iPad is not and never have been a hub for HomeKit.

Having this issue as well for all iPhones/iPads that are part of the home. Using Apple TV as the hub. No HomePods are part of the home.

it’s ridiculous this has been going on for months without a fix. I’ve tried disconnecting various accessories for a few days to see if it was some particular device going crazy but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

it feels as if iOS/iPadOS is just constantly polling something. This really needs to be fixed soon, 15.3 hasn’t helped

I noticed I don't see any background activity by the Home app when my iPad is plugged in. But when it's not plugged in, Home app is showing 20+ min of background activity every hour. Anyone else noticing this?

Same issue here very obviously on iPad. Home never ranked high on battery usage. Currently on iPadOS 15.3 similarly draining 10% a day when the iPad is unplugged and not used for days. So it’s almost always dead when I use it 1-2x a week. NO SUCH ISSUES PRIOR TO iPadOS 15.x.

Home ranks as the highest battery usage app day after day with no use by the user. It’s drains the iPad to death. iPad shuts down. Again this is with NO USER INPUT, just sitting in a computer bag.

Same iPad only different. It’s like iPadOS 15 is the opposite effect of the M1 chip in MacBook Pro. It kills my battery.

Apple letting this fester is what leads conspiracy theorist to say Apple intentionally hampers old devices so users buy new iPads and iPhones.

My iPad is almost always unplugged. Seems like the iPad is checking in excessively when UNplugged and not when being charged. Did an Apple developer tick the wrong box???? Shouldn’t it be check-in more often when charging and way less often when not.???

I have the newest line of Apple devices.

My iPhone 13 and 11 Pro / iPad Pro 2021 and 2018 and other devices are completely discharged at night without use for 4 months.

It is impossible to use anything at home without charging 3 times a day. Apple urgently fix the problems or refund the money. I'll have to look for another company.

Home Kit.

I have an iPhone 13 that I bought yesterday.

Disabled all Home notifications, geolocation and face recognition.

The phone ran out of battery overnight. I'm paying for an Apple One subscription. Everything is terrible!

I don’t even use this app and it drains my battery. The worst is that it starts as soon as I plug the battery in for charging at night and i have an external battery too. As soon as i get it to stop it starts charging again.

Same issue has been happening on my iPhone XS for a few months. Excessive battery drain while idling with Home/Accessories usually on top. I went as far as getting a new battery installed in my phone, assuming that had to be the problem, but no, the problem persists.

The same issue for me and I have even tried deleting the home app.

I read in another thread from some people having these issues that have similar components in their home setup as mine and I am wondering now if that's what may be causing the issue.

In my setup I have:

• Unifi devices for wifi and network
• Lutron bridge and switches for lights and fans
• 2 Arlo cameras and
• A Hue bridge so I can use my old hue remotes to control the Lutron fan switches.

Do you have a similar setup? Maybe we can isolate the component causing the issue if that is the case.

Thanks in advance.

Same here, problem still existing. It is annoying... For me it affects iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 8, iPad Pro (2018). Regular iPad 10.2 from 2020 does not have the issue despite also having access to the whole home...

Yeah, this is what I'm seeing. I was wondering why my iPad battery was draining faster than usual and I finally checked the battery usage stats today. About 28 minutes of Home background activity every hour when unplugged, accounting for almost 90% of battery usage during those hours. If I fully charge it, then unplug it. It will lose at least 25% battery overnight.

Over the past 10 days the Home app has had 44 hours of background usage (only 3m of on screen use), accounting for a full 35% of battery usage for those 10 days.

Hello CarlMcCoy,

I already tried your workaround in the past, with no success. The iPhone SE that I use is always in flight mode with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled.

The battery drain is also happening during the day, not only at night in my case.

As suggested by MG51015BB we should wait for a definitive fix as that issue didn’t appear with iOS 14.

In addition to the above, are folks also seeing impacted network behavior? I saw this drain earlier, but after 15.2.1 (and is still present with 15.3.1) I'm also seeing degradation of performance of apple devices on the same network as the HomeKit. If I put my iPad (or iPhone) on the guest network they work fine. If they're on the same network as my Home, the iPad, Apple TV, iPhone and HomePod mini's can be laggy at times. Apps will feel like they temporarily freeze, or Siri will take 10s to tell you what time is it.